Thursday, August 04, 2011

Struggling in a wilderness

Who is the Plankton? She is a woman pushing 50 who decided to divorce her husband a few years ago. She has written a blog detailing her unhappiness in being unable to find another man.

The Daily Mail has an article about her, but her blog itself is even more interesting.

The first thing to note is that she really does want to be with a man. She isn't pretending otherwise:

Show me a (straight) woman of my age who is alone and who says she doesn’t want a man.

Show me a liar.

She isn't coping well at all with her life as it is:

As a divorced woman the wrong side of 45 with a brace of kids, I am a plankton on the food chain of sexuality and the prospect of a relationship.

Women die long before they actually die ... I may live till I am ninety, but a sort of death has already come. I am already in a wilderness ... A woman’s trajectory; a barrel of laughs.

So why hasn't she found someone? She believes, rightly or wrongly, that the most eligible men are chasing after younger women:

A man can pick from a wider pool of women: his age and under, by several decades. I have a friend who is late thirties and lives with and has children by a man in his mid sixties. She is one of the youngest girlfriends he has had but by no means the only one of her age. He is paunchy and has grey chest hair and is not especially rich ... They argue a lot and she is not particularly happy yet is counting herself lucky. He plucked her out of a richesse of willing women. All circling him like vultures, they were, before my friend “got” him.

That might be exaggerated, but you can see where she is coming from. When she married she was young enough to still have the experience of sexual power that younger women have. After her divorce, she was suddenly thrust into a different world, one in which it was the men of her age who had the better options. It seems as if she is finding it difficult to adjust to the change.

So is it all doom and gloom for women? It doesn't have to be. The traditional idea was that women would encourage the qualities in men that would make them good husbands (the family man ideal) and would give up some of the sexual power they wielded in their 20s (by committing to one man rather than pursuing casual relationships with many) and in return men would give up some of the sexual power they wielded later in life (by remaining loyal to their wives).

The "Plankton" unfortunately seems to have pursued the more modern understanding of relationships. In her 20s, at that critical time for women, she went for (you guessed it) the bad boys. In discussing what she is now looking for in a man she writes:

Kind is obvious, and absolutely the opposite of what I sought when I was young, to my cost. Then, good-looking and cool was more important. Now, cool is what I actively do not want. I did cool men in my twenties and cool was invariably synonymous with cruel.

This is really a way of saying that she was selecting men on the basis of sexual attraction alone, rather than considering as well what kind of husband a man might make. Her orientation to sexual attraction alone is reflected too in her promiscuity at this time:

Of course, my young self consoled myself with the thought that quantity not quality validated me as an attractive sexual being, though my older self knows better – or at least thinks she does. Quantity, then, was important. Now, not so much.

Quantity, she admits, was important. Particularly with cool/cruel men.

It's not a very good way for women to secure a long-term future with a man in marriage. It distorts the culture of relationships between men and women - puts it on the wrong foundation.

The message of all this, I think, is that there are women too who have much to lose from the sexual revolution. Is the "liberation" of pursuing cruel/bad boys in your 20s really worth decades of unhappiness later on? According to the "Plankton" she was not even made happy in her 20s by her promiscuity:

It didn’t make me happy then, in my twenties ... for the most part these notches constituted no more than notches or, at best, meaningless and at worst, malign names on a green bit of paper.

Better for women to be oriented to the creation of happy and stable marriages - and for this to inform what women select for when they are at the peak of "the food chain of sexuality".

The notion that men have the option of marrying younger women is a myth. Young women don't want older men unless they are very wealthy and then it is simply a case of marrying the money. An older man has no real attraction for a younger woman save the financial. Marriages with a significant age gap are the exception and not the norm and their divorce rates are higher than average.

A stable society cannot be fostered by relationships with large age gaps.

Women have 15 years or so when they are adult, fertile and highly attractive to the opposite sex [if they are lucky].

Considering the average female lifespan is now reaching past 80 logic would suggest that a career is what a woman can afford to put off, not a family.

When seen through the prism of basic biology [forgetting society as a whole] it simply makes sense for women to marry when as attractive as possible and then attempt to achieve financial independence later once they have had children and their looks are fading.

And that is even looking at the issue from a liberalish perspective.

No matter which way you look at it the current life path promoted for middle class girls is set up wrong. Both for society and for the prospects of women themselves as individuals.

By assuming that everything associated with the feminine is an evil social construct and trying to expunge all traces of it from society liberals seem to have forgotten that women are the ones who have children, which we kinda need to pay for our old age if nothing else.

Nature does not care what you do when your fertility is gone. The goal is to get the best genes (whatever it means) and have offspring. That is the reason for chasing for bad boys.Nature does not care about society or even civilization. But actions in society create feedback which keeps nature in chains.Throughout the history, there was another feedback called "consequencies of life choices" but it has been removed by a welfare state.Women have always been trying to break chains constraining nature. Societies either inhibited it or perished.

I doubt the plankton are really very lonely. They are entitled, that's all. When they were younger, they saw no good in the hordes of genuine nice guys that they condemned to single-hood. A little later they cheated on or dumped the men they did get, or often they effectively decided that no man was good enough for them. Then a bit later they blame the men again. Somehow there are single women in their age group, but no (visible) single men - just as there were no (visible) good guys when they were younger. And so they complain and blame men - and bring nothing else but blame and complaint to any potential relationship, especially not fertility.

True loneliness and sorrow does not carve out a path of such undeviating self-love, entitlement and empty demanding.

It's time that tells the truth, and it already has.

The truth is that a young woman of no special gifts who wants a lifetime of devotion from a man far better than herself can have that with trivial ease. There are so many good men locked out, made invisible, that any woman who opens her eyes is spoiled for choice.

I have seen a head of pretty red hair, an average face, an average body, no brains, little character, and no manners or charm outweigh doctorates and businesses a-building, respectable masculine looks, unimpeachable character and puppy-like devotion, to the point where the girl placed herself above all the men who courted her, and so they wasted months in her romantic service and were sent off. They knew failure and loneliness and bitter tears; she knew only a vast and petulant sense of deserving more.

I don't think that really changes. These girls, even when they become old girls, never evolve beyond: "but I deserve so much more!"

"Nature does not care what you do when your fertility is gone. The goal is to get the best genes (whatever it means) and have offspring. That is the reason for chasing for bad boys."

But bad boys don't have the best genes. The state prevents middle class and upper-middle class men from putting them in their place.

Their appearance of the best genes is purely artificial as they can act out without fear of retribution from the state as they have nothing to lose. Jail means nothing to a criminal/thug/drug-dealer.

However, jail would destroy the life-style/life-strategy of Middle class men and hence they can't put 'bad boys' in their place, (as they would be able to in a state of nature), without the state coming full force down on them and taking away everything they own, (lose job, lose house/assets from civil litigation, lose career prospects, and hence lose the minimum sexual success they would obtain from all those things they just lost.)

A 100-130 IQ man/men in a state of nature is/are vastly superior (and I'm talking in a ruthless/vicious/ability to dominate and kill sense) to a 70-90 IQ man/men in a state of nature. It's just that today, 'the Leviathan' skews the market against them.

If you want to end this, your best off changing the system (the Leviathan) so that it doesn't work against middle-class and upper-middle class men. Do that and the women will come, for the middle-class and upper-middle class men's position of lower sexual attractiveness compared to 'bad boys' is not one that is inherent to them by nature, but is instead the result of the way our society has been structured.

"As for posh, I hasten to say I am not dreaming of a duke. What I mean by posh is someone who is not going to get at me for being middle-class. Someone who is not going to question my choice of supermarket or holiday or school for my children. There are many, many things that are hard to live with: arrogance, selfishness, pomposity and so forth, but chippiness is right up there at the top. Chippiness chips away at you till you despair. I don’t want to have to feel a strain in my own environment about being who I am, to feel ashamed of my fortunate friends and my many advantages and my bourgeois choices. That’s the only reason I want a bit of posh.

So posh and rich, and no less important: kind and grown-up."

Etc.

So the minimum, for visible men, is that they pay for whatever she wants to buy, whenever she wants to buy it, including big ticket items, without the least hesitation, meaning no strain on their ample finances, and also with no thought that they might ever tell her "no".

How many and how excellent are the children she will provide for a man who gives her all this? Her answer is none, and they must gladly be cuckolded in advance, as she is raising another man's children.

This +10! You articulate quite well some of the flaws in those who take the bad boy genes theory too literally. The game is stacked against men who are aware of the consequenses of their actions, and lets men who are willing to risk much for a small return to win in the short run.

There's also this: Those men with IQs +1SD over the norm who are not totally unattractive know they will sooner or later be able to attract and marry a suitable woman, time in on their side. As they mature, they will assass high income and security, and more social confidence to win women. Men who start with a "score" of 2 at 20 can quite often end up a 10 at 35 (think Bill Gates as an extreme example of this).

In the meantime, the low IQ alphas are taking themselves out of the game through disease, jail, injury, and other problems which accompany the self-destructive lifestyles they generally engage in.

In the long run, the ones with the good genes (if we must look at the world like that) end up with good spouses, jobs, and multiple kids they can raise to also be sensible providers who can demonstrate the qualities women crave. The added benefit is the women who are really dim have taken themselves out of the pool by wasting their lives with men who, in the long run, are the real losers.

chris:"A 100-130 IQ man/men in a state of nature is/are vastly superior (and I'm talking in a ruthless/vicious/ability to dominate and kill sense) to a 70-90 IQ man/men in a state of nature. It's just that today, 'the Leviathan' skews the market against them."

Hmm, interesting. I don't think I've ever seen this argument before. It would seem to be a new phenomenon though, the State siding with the Bad against the Good; probably post-'50s.

That's a good point. I remember back when I was about 20. There was a very pretty girl I liked but she had a boyfriend. The boyfriend was "cool" - he had the torn t-shirt, the leather jacket, the drug habit, the self-destructive impulses.

He was not much of a specimen of manhood. It's difficult to think of any way that he had the best genes. But still the girl went for him.

I don't think the issue is just the limitations the state puts on higher IQ men organising in a superior way to establish dominance - though that's certainly an angle to consider.

Part of the problem too is that unlike in past periods of history, women can now set aside their 20s for casual sexual relationships. So they aren't thinking as much about "husband" qualities in men. That's been deferred until their 30s.

It's a dangerous strategy for women for a whole variety of reasons which traditionalists need to make clear.

I only ran into her once again, some years later. She was no longer with him. She hadn't yet had children.

I don't know what happened to him. He was not exactly physically robust when I knew him and he had a serious drug habit, so I doubt if he had it in him to become the steady, hard working family man type. But I really don't know.

Well I did know tons of good men, and the ones that asked me out ended up being rats LOL!

It's so weird to realize that men had so much bitterness towards women at age 18-22.

I got asked out by a smart, fantastic-bodied man when I was 18/19. The guy was so into me. But I didn't go out with him.

Why??? Because I wasn't sexually awake yet! Yes it's true! He wanted marriage and had a condo...and I had just graduated highschool and hadn't gotten to go to prom, and was just a kid mentally.

I mean seriously? I was a baby with no sex drive yet! LOL! Honestly, I had huge crushes on boys but as far as 'men' *say with a low voice* and grown-up relationships, that didn't kick in till really my mid-twenties.

You guys all suck.

If I ever hear a 40 year old man whine about being rejected by women in his teens/twenties I will dump his ass for being a loser twit.

And it seems like men are almost trying to trick me into "Well if you would be a woman, and do this and this, then magically we'd turn into good men and love you."

And it's like, umm....I don't buy that.

The good men I know, are good men. They just are.

If 10% of the female population is giving it away for free, then 30% of the male population is going to ride those babies.

I know several beta male 'provider types' who if you met at a wedding you'd go "Oh wow what a great guy...women are awful for making him single"

But see I've dated them. And they were really nasty men. One guy (short, successful engineer) couldn't shut up about breast implants around me. Many lie. One slept with prostitutes (from Africa).

I mean really Mark. Some of these Poor Innocent Betas...are really the sharkiest of them all.

Look at Roosh, and if you met him at a wedding and just knew he was a 'successful writer' you wouldn't think that he's a female whore, you'd probably even say to your wife "See, a guy like that in this day in age...." LOL!

The women in the audience love him because he's nerdy and successful and he seems like a "Good Guy."

Now, according to gossip he bedded a girl over the weekend after filming.

He also has been to 70+ countries....and well....From my experiences....Successful Betas who travel the world...tend not to do a lot of sight seeing.

So it's like.....These men...are not so innocent.

So if you're a girl who doesn't marry the guy you bedded at 18-20, and manage to keep him sexually occupied throughout your 20s.

Well then life is pretty tough.

Because by the time your 25 and 'ready for a real grown-up relationship' all the men have ridden the vagina carousel, or have realized that they would rather do that then get married because "I'm too old at 25 and I didn't give it up to them at 18"And they are all bitter that they didn't get laid at 18.

I have no sympathy at all for "Plankton". Serves her right for divorcing a perfectly good husband. There was a time when divorced women were generally rejected by polite society. Someone who has brokenher marital vows is a very low kind of person, why should any man reward her with marriage?

Except the Daily Mail reporter did contact her and quote her, so it's not likely this time to be a hoax.

Female anon,

The situation we have now is that middle-class women have been encouraged to defer marriage until sometime after they turn 30. Their 20s are supposed to be for career, travel, parties and casual, non-serious relationships.

That changes the type of men that women select for in their 20s. Women no longer have to factor in how intelligent the man is, how loyal, the similarity in values or life goals, what her parents might think of him, what any future children might turn out to be like or look like, nor even the emotional connection she feels to him.

In fact, a man who was good for a long term relationship might be dismissed as being a possible hindrance to an independent, career girl lifestyle.

Instead, women have been "liberated" in their 20s to go for flings based on sexual attraction alone - which often leads them to bad boy/dangerous men/exotic men/player men types.

These women have it in mind that the men they will eventually marry will just hang around waiting until the woman is ready in her 30s to finally take marriage seriously. And maybe that sometimes happens.

But obviously a lot of men won't want to wait around that long. They'll observe other men being rewarded by women not for being loyal, stable family man types, but for being the cool dude, player types. Many men will adapt. And, yes, once they adapt some will find it difficult to go back.

But remember, it was the women of the 80s and 90s who brought about the shift. And I can't see things improving while there is the cultural expectation amongst women that marriage is to be left until some vague time in one's 30s.

To be fair to the plankton, she is not looking for an affair with a married man.

And there is nothing wrong with wanting a rich, posh extension of one's will. That's a sort of tool I would think a member of a tool-using species would want.

But I think that there is a gulf between the pangs of feeling entitled to such an excellent tool and not having one to hand, and the pangs of a good widow who has faithfully loved her husband all the days of her life, and who has somehow lost her children (or who through a medical problem never had any) and who is now alone, alone, alone!

That is what I meant when I said before that "I doubt the plankton are really very lonely. They are entitled, that's all."

I don't doubt that they are distressed. But not in the way that the truly faithful, deprived of the objects of their faithfulness are distressed.

It's the frustration of morally licit and overpowering drives that should strike us with deep and respectful pity.

Back on Mark Richardson's laudable "sensible life planning for women" kick...

Life after outliving a husband might be a lot more bearable for a woman who took care to marry when she was young enough to have a decent number of children, hopefully including at least one or two who will keep in touch with her. The right time to first think about having children who will be a comfort in one's old age is not in one's thirties.

"The situation we have now is that middle-class women have been encouraged to defer marriage until sometime after they turn 30. Their 20s are supposed to be for career, travel, parties and casual, non-serious relationships.

That changes the type of men that women select for in their 20s. Women no longer have to factor in how intelligent the man is, how loyal, the similarity in values or life goals, what her parents might think of him, what any future children might turn out to be like or look like, nor even the emotional connection she feels to him.

In fact, a man who was good for a long term relationship might be dismissed as being a possible hindrance to an independent, career girl lifestyle.

Instead, women have been "liberated" in their 20s to go for flings based on sexual attraction alone - which often leads them to bad boy/dangerous men/exotic men/player men types.

These women have it in mind that the men they will eventually marry will just hang around waiting until the woman is ready in her 30s to finally take marriage seriously. And maybe that sometimes happens.

But obviously a lot of men won't want to wait around that long. They'll observe other men being rewarded by women not for being loyal, stable family man types, but for being the cool dude, player types. Many men will adapt. And, yes, once they adapt some will find it difficult to go back.

But remember, it was the women of the 80s and 90s who brought about the shift. And I can't see things improving while there is the cultural expectation amongst women that marriage is to be left until some vague time in one's 30s."

Here is an interview with Mark Regnerus a Sociologist from the University of Texas and co-author of 'Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying' which pertains to your comment.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/19/young_women_romance/

An interesting snippet which relates specifically to what you mention above and provides academic authority for it;

"So how do we measure how people price this? A couple different ways: First, the time until they have sex in a relationship. A second measure is the number of sex partners that "sub-optimal men" have had. I define that group as men who are 22 years old, dropped out of high school and don't have a full-time job -- men who don't have a lot going for them. We compare the number of partners they've had with the number of partners of a male college graduate who is employed full-time. Theoretically, if sex is valuable to her then she's not going to trade it away to just some crummy man, and when we look at the data, we find that those sub-optimal men report a lot more partners than men who actually have a lot going for them.

This is where I get a little bit controversial and people don't like what I have to say. I don't think it's in women's interest to play the field for a long period of time. It can get depressing, not only about their relationships but to see the pool of men in their 30s who are available. My advice is if you find somebody who you love and who loves you, make it work, whatever it takes! To always think that something better is down the pathway, you might be mistaken.

I think it's a bad idea for women collectively to compete with each other for men and to just sort of say I'll do whatever it takes to be in a relationship with men. Women need to somehow reacquire control over the direction of relationships. They feel like they don't have control. They feel like he calls the shots. That is most unfortunate. Part of that, I think, involves -- and this is what some women don't want to hear -- the artificial restriction of sex until later in the relationship. You might not feel like doing that but it's for a greater future goal. Men who have sex early in a relationship feel little impulse to make strong commitments. Women desperately want that to not be true, but it is. Men and women make relationship commitments very differently. It doesn't sound modern and it doesn't sound natural, but I don't care what it sounds like, I'm telling you how things work. Giving it away early gives a great deal of power to him."

Susan Walsh, a person who blogs on Hookup Culture from the perspective of women also touched on this interview if you wish to read it.

I also remember at some point, in some article, Mark Regnerus saying that a hook up culture (or a culture of short-term mating in one's youth) tends to create men who adapt to that culture and become players/cads rather then providers, whether in their youth or later in life. So women pursuing a short-term mating strategy in their youth and hoping to change to a long-term one in their thirties will find that all the men from their youth have become cads and aren't changing back. I just wish that I could find the article which said this but I can't, so maybe it is in his book.

"I know several beta male 'provider types' who if you met at a wedding you'd go "Oh wow what a great guy...women are awful for making him single"

But see I've dated them. And they were really nasty men. One guy (short, successful engineer) couldn't shut up about breast implants around me. Many lie. One slept with prostitutes (from Africa).

I mean really Mark. Some of these Poor Innocent Betas...are really the sharkiest of them all."

Really, now. These men become nasty because they have to cope with a nasty world. From the sound of it, these guys are older. Beta they may be (though I doubt the engineer was), at this point they're as entitled as the women who rejected them before. If the girls their age could afford to ignore them when they were younger, now that they can turn the tables they'll be as nasty as they want to be simply because they sexual marketplace is now in their favor. A broken world begets broken men.

"and would give up some of the sexual power they wielded in their 20s (by committing to one man rather than pursuing casual relationships with many)"

Women's attractiveness and fertility peak around 21-24 years of age, and getting commitment from men is always more difficult for women than getting sex from them. So if, say, a 23-year-old woman gets married, she isn't giving up some of her sexual power. In fact, she's utilizing it to the highest degree (or getting the highest possible return on investment) by snagging the highest-status men she will ever be able to snag in her entire life.